Bottles And Such
by Itty Bitty Albatross
Summary: Percy loves the sea, and the land during a storm, and the way his love for others washed like a dangerous tide. Merfolk!AU.


Settle down, loves, and let me tell you a story.

I'll tell you a story of when the waves like to crash on the coast here with a wailing noise, a shrieking that will turn heads to the sea and drive all thoughts away except for that one concern.

'The folk are disturbed', the old men whisper over their beers or over the lines of their fishing trails, whispering in hushed tones as if the folk they referred to could hear them. 'They're itching for a storm.'

And if Percy, one of the folk those battered sailors spoke about, could only just find a storm, he'd be happy and the shrieking could settle a bit.

The yelling of the folk—of Percy and Annabeth, of little Marie, of Grover—would stop when the storm blew in like a threat from the East.

But only then.

.

Percy is little, a guppy in a too-big fin and gaping eyes, the first time he walks on the shore. Annabeth—Annabeth of the golden hair and the glittering, gunmetal scales and the constant rattle of 'ting-ting-ting' of her bracelet and the 'did-you-knows' of her mouth—has gone ashore before, has gone for years and years, but she doesn't want to go now. Going ashore hurts, it hurts her feet and her skin and her heart because the shore was lovely but it wasn't for her, not yet.

She waited below in the helm of a wreck, running a finger over the names carved into its hull—Percy could see there from here, from his spot on the surface.

The water washes him back and forth and eventually lets him get to the shore, where the rain pours down.

The rain falls harsh against his scalp, his shoulders, the tender skin of new legs, when he drags himself out of the water.

It stings in the most beautiful way, beating a heartbeat into his body, and Percy opens his mouth and screams out to that living thing of a storm.

.

Percy loves Annabeth more than he loves the land, loves the air, loves his own pulsing heart. So when she tells him, leaning out of the boat and over the water, he takes her hand and turns it in his own, a wondrous thing, so gently.

Her head is an uncovered, woven mess of gold, and her legs are tan and folded beneath her, taunting him.

"I love him." She promises, made up of all these broken edges and streams of salt, desperate for him to understand. After all the terrors they've born together, she needs this, needs to know he knows.

"I love you, too." She tells him. In her eyes, she's trying to give him a gift, the gift of her love, the love he owned since the days when they were small, so small.

In his eyes, when she says that she is drowning him—and that's saying a lot for a merman who's never, ever felt the sensation of drowning.

He pulls her hand down a bit and looks at it under the shimmering surface.

There, the scar she'd gotten that day they'd spent playing on the reef, even though they knew they weren't supposed to be there.

There, above it, was the simple, thin band of gold. It looks beautiful, so much prettier here, under the water, but it was nothing compared to the pretty mother-of-pearl shimmer of that scar.

He knows. Percy knows that he would drag Annabeth into the water with him, into another reef, another injury, because—even though they were so different—they were so alike.

Percy likes the way she looks in scars better than the way she looks in gold, which is why she's his best friend but can be his lover no longer.

He lets her hand go and she breaths easier, the swamp of her lungs clearing out of the face of danger, even as the salt of her tears mingles with the water he swims in.

"I'll show you to shore." He promises in return.

.

_His hand was shaking when he settled it, soft, and the pelt parted like water beneath his fingers._

.

If he'd been entirely merfolk, entirely born of the sea and the surge, he would have pulled her into the water on that night.

It's a tale as old as time—a love so great, he would have drowned her for it. Merfolk can't help or stand the emotions that run like hurricanes through them.

Percy isn't entirely sea-born; he had a human father, a fisherman, one whose last breaths were made up of the ocean. Annabeth is built the same.

They are both just human enough to hurt the other. They both have the same blend of blood and salt water in their veins.

.

It's the children who notice the storm blowing in, most days. The young ones who see the clouds that run like fugitives through the sky, and they run like those clouds to their mommies and daddies, to warn them that the sky's about to open up.

The wives and the children would gather up the loose things, tie back the curtains and stack up the papers to be shoved in a drawer, to keep them from falling into the snatching fingers of a damp wind.

When every sane person was tucked away safely, away from the pouring rain and the wind that howled like ghosts, then the merfolk themselves would walk.

It's well known that the merfolk, those half-fish wild denizens of the water, could only come ashore when the storm raged.

When the storm hits—when you can't see a hand in front of your face or a lighthouse a mile away—those days are when the folk leave the sea and walk like people onto the land.

Only, it's not just the storm that stops you from seeing that lighthouse beam.

The lighthouse keeper's not in there, like he should be. He's down on the rocks by the water, where the hungry ocean grabs at him, where the hungry hands wait for him.

.

Red. There's red everywhere, in Percy's vision.

The old men mention it, some days, and I'll tell you now the first rule of the merfolk.

-you wear that hat, that red piece of cloth, and you don't take it off except for one person.

Because when that one person has it, when you hand that blood-red-soft thing to another living soul, there's no getting it back.

If a merperson gives their hat to another, it means they're in love. Once another person holds that hat, there's no going back to the sea. All that that person needs to do is put on that hat, and you can't leave them.

If a mermaid ever hands you that damnable cap, you hand it back, because that's an awful lot of power for one man.

Except—if a mermaid ever hands you that cap—you're not going to give it back. When you fall head-over-heels, hell-or-high-water in love with a merfolk, there's no going back for you, either.

.

_Another hand with long fingers, fingers bound together by webbing up to the first knuckle, wrapped around his in a tight grip._

.

Percy likes to sit on top of the water, feel the sun hit his body and shine off the vivid green of his scales. He feels alive and happy when the sun's out.

But that's nothing; nothing compares his joy when the sun goes away behind a cover of rain clouds.

.

There's a couple—a set of two, a matching pair, a dark and a light, an up and a down, both watersoaked and delighting in it—sitting on the rocks near the coast.

The rain is brutal and it rips at them like it wants to punish them for being happy—maybe it does, does that matter?—but Nico is a solid anchor with a rope around his waist, tied to a metal hook that juts out of a rock with a knot only a sailor would know.

Bloody, damned sailors. They never know what they're getting in to, when they reach out their scarred and roughened hands like Nico does now, to stroke against the slick of scales.

Percy shivers, wonders why he ever bothers leaving the shore, because kissing Nico sometimes makes him forget the rules of being a merman. Hang the rules, anyway.

.

That first storm, Percy wanders the cliffs of Dalig Älf Straanden, marveling in the feeling of rocks under the soles of his feet.

He lost his mother, his beloved mother, too young for her to impress upon him how dangerous the rocks are, not that he would have listened to her if she had told him.

It's in the nature of a merman to let emotions rule, to act passionately and violently and cruelly for the sake of love.

It's in the nature of a human to know the logic, the memory, the learned and flawed ideas, but to act anyway out of the sheer desire to _live_.

.

_Hate was not the hardest lesson to learn, indifferences was; so he bore the weight of that world on his shoulders and inhaled the wet air. _

.

The second storm Annabeth walks the shore with him. They play tag through the empty streets of a town, past the knowing eyes of a neighbor in a window who can barely make out their figures but knows what they are because no human gets out in that weather.

When they grow tired, infrequently-used muscles in their legs shaking and buckling from the strain of walking, the storm still rages like a loosed beast.

There are a number of songs that the merfolk sing and these two children yell them out, sing them badly at the sky, comfortable in knowing that all the others are elsewhere on shore or in the sea, and they can't be heard over the wailing of the wind. They're very vocally based, merfolk. Annabeth doesn't know it, but the song she yells to the sky was one that her father used to court her mother before that watery end.

The two of them know they won't go inland very far, because Percy has no intention to wander the land and see the unknown when there's an ocean right there for him. Annabeth would like to see it someday, though she doesn't say so.

Right now, she sees no future beyond what Percy sees. That's the mermaid trait of hers, that short-sightedness in the face of a pure form of love.

Years later, Annabeth would sit on the back of a motorcycle and laugh down at the Colorado River from the edge of a canyon, a canyon so big and glorious it steals her breath and sweeps it downriver. She'll wrap her hands—long fingers and soft palms, the hands of a mermaid after all this time—around the waist of a blonde man in a red bandana.

He's got a scar down his cheek, cutting the path of a tear.

See what I was saying about a mermaid's love of scars?

.

_His fingers, twined with the other person's, danced along the break in the skin beneath the black fur._

.

Percy's got scars, all over. A fishhook here, a shoal cut there, a bite from a fish that wanted to protect its territory.

One day—one storm, naturally—Nico runs a finger along each and every one of them. He follows the finger with a set of lips, and Percy wraps his hands up in Nico's dark hair.

"Are you sure you're not merfolk?" Percy asks incredulously, in the lilting accent of his kind, words dragging down by the force of the wind that blows the rain nearly horizontal.

"Positive." Nico answers, but Percy's not, not really.

This man is one who braves every storm that blows around for the touch of Percy's skin, he sings songs that Percy's never heard of, he runs his chapped lips along the healing seam of a cut on the back of Percy's neck.

Percy can see the dark fury in black eyes, the tsunami storm of wonder and greed in his mouth, the unending tide of his pulse next to Percy's ear.

No person not born of the sea has that much emotion, that much of the ocean in their lungs.

It's a good thing Percy trusts Nico, though, because pulling him towards the water would be both a very good, and a very bad thing.

.

Percy is young, a young and wild-eyed adolescent, when Annabeth starts going ashore without him.

That's when he knows that she had found someone to love that wasn't him, and it hurt. It is a roaring reminder that he will never, never be good enough for her, for his stormy-eyed friend.

She is his family, his only family, and he would have swum the world's oceans over twice if it meant she'd stay with him.

But then he knows that that wasn't fair, not really—he didn't love her, not in that way, not in the way that she needs someone to love her.

He loves her more than life itself, and Annabeth needs someone who would love her selfishly, so that she would never drag them down the way her mother had been dragged down.

He wants her to be with him so that he can always know that she's safe, even if he knows that he would not keep her safe. There will always be another reef, another scar, another beautiful reminder.

They share too many memories.

.

It's been a year since Annabeth rowed that little boat out to the cusk, beyond the point where the waves break.

Percy saw the drifting splinters before anything.

In typical merfolk fashion, he started hunting around the wreckage of a ship for anything shiny.

It's pure chance—or maybe fate, I only deal in the ocean and its children, not in that grand scheme—that he comes across that length of dark wood with the body tossed over it.

Only, it's not a body in the sense that's it's an empty shell. The chest rises, the chest falls, and Percy makes a choice.

This man—boy, honestly, he's young and small and dark, like he came from farther south—has a bag clutched in one hand. Percy grabs that, too, when he wraps his fingers around the busted board and tows.

It's an easy distance for a merman, especially a healthy one like Percy, but less so when he's towing another person and a heavy bag like the boy's got.

The whole time he's swimming, when his tail pounds through the water like a propeller no boat will ever be able to match, he thinks 'stupid, stupid, stupid sailors'.

But the whole time, it never even occurs to him to just let go and let the boy drown, not until he's pulled him up onto the shore and let the sand fall everywhere.

"Stupid." He admonishes out loud, but he doesn't seem sure whether he's berating the sailor for being in a wreck, or himself for saving him.

"I know." The dark boy has dark eyes, and webbed fingers, but it Percy doesn't notice those yet. The sailor's been awake for half the journey.

When he first woke up, he said his name was Nico Di Angelo.

He's Nico of Angels, Nico of the dark eyes like a danger's and a secret, buried deep in his heart and his canvas bag.

"Thank you." He says quietly. He's weak, limp, shaking like a leaf in a storm, and Percy wants to see him in a storm.

He says so, out loud, and Nico looks at him long from his collapsed position on the beach.

"Are you sure?" He asked, and Percy isn't at all sure and that's the most wonderful thing about it.

It ends up being two days before Nico of Angels has his strength back, and he's hired on to take care of the lighthouse.

His first task?

He pounds that eye-hook into the rock near the drop of the cliff, so that he can sit near the edge in the roughest of weather and not fear washing away.

Or being dragged away.

.

_He couldn't breathe for the pressure in his chest, of the pounding fury and fear and cruel delight_.

.

He knows about Luke, of course.

Luke is the only child he knew of who didn't fear the merfolk.

He wasn't from their ocean area—he was from the inner lakes, of different water beings, lands of large beasts with scales that'll eat your sheep in the dead of night.

Merfolk don't do that. Sheep taste weird.

Annabeth knew Luke before Percy and his mother every washed into the area. Luke was the one who taught her to play with the knucklebones, who taught her the way through the streets of a ghost town during a storm.

'He looks like a duck', she said of Luke in his weather gear, as she taught Percy to play knucklebones—it was a game ill-suited to underwater, but perfect for playing in the midst of a windy storm. A perfect challenge.

.

Perhaps I should now tell you of another people who share the life of the merfolk: selkies.

A selkie is a person a lot like you and me, only brown and soft when they don their other skin.

Seal in the water, human on land.

Like the folk, they've got a special something, a treasure-of-a-lifetime: a fur pelt. As long as it's whole and it's theirs, they can return to the sea. When they give it away, they're stranded on the land.

I could tell you many a tale of the tears of a selkie who's had their pelt stolen, broken, left for damaged. They can't get back into that skin for all the wishing in the world, so they wander like lost children, wanting for their mother.

But when all's right in the world, they can slip from one skin to another like you and I slip from our daily clothes.

With a selkie, a seal-man, there are a few laws, like with any part of our world.

A selkie is always starving for the sound of the waves in their ears.

A selkie cannot tell a lie to another being of the water.

A selkie, as a human, has dark eyes and webbed fingers.

.

Percy runs his hands along the striations in the rock. He's in a cave, the dark permeating around him, the water still save for the movements he makes when he splashes his long, thin tail.

If Annabeth was here, she would call it a 'grotto', but Annabeth ran to the land for a life of untold adventure with a duck-man who taught her the streets.

If Nico were here, he would call it a 'hide-a-way', as his kind love to brand things with what they're used for, not what they are.

If his mother were here, she would call it a prison. Right now Percy's feeling the salt-water part of his blood, and it's suffocating him.

"Why, why, why…" Percy asks—demands of the striped and jagged walls.

He knows the answer, doesn't need them to tell him.

It's a truth carved into the floor of the ocean, sang into a hundred different songs, written on the edge of the world where the water meets the moon on a horizon.

'It's in the nature of a mermaid to suffer'.

.

_It was useless, lying there on the wooden table, but oh, so precious anyway. It was a thought, not a motion._

_._

One day not long after that, Percy discovers two things about glass bottles:

1. If you seal them tight enough, they will hold a scrap of paper in them, a paper inscribed with a message that must not blur and wash away like the rest of him inevitably will.

2. If you tie a rope around that bottle's neck, like a noose, you can loop that rope through an eye-hook that's been driven as a permanent fixture (a _promise)_ into a rock, to where it won't be missed by a lonely, lost-child, abandoned lover.

.

Another reminder to you ones, loves, you people listening to me try to tell you this story:

The mermaids and the selkies hurt no more than you and I.

They only feel it stronger.

.

When the next storm comes, Percy pulls himself out of the restlessly tossing sea and into the water that poured in sheets.

He walks the familiar path as the pins-and-needles in his legs retreated, until he can rest his naked back against the craggy surface of the rocks.

The world around him is swirling in patterns of blues and greys, dark greens and flashes of clearer yellows where the sun shone through for a second before falling back before the clouds. He holds out a hand just to see how far he could move it away, but only makes it an arm's length before it was blurry beyond recognition.

He blinks. He blinks again. The water runs down his face, a reminder of the tears he can't shed, even if what he wants to happen won't happen.

But it does happen. The figure makes its way out of the grey, streaky gloom to nestle against the rocks next to him, to slip a rope through the eye and tie it securely.

It's the first time Percy's gotten here before Nico, and it burns like too much sun on skin, red and angry.

"You came." Percy breathes it out even though breathing hurts a little and water runs into his mouth.

"Of course." Nico responds.

"You know I'm dangerous." Percy can't help but say it, but to touch the rope that binds his lover—his _love_—to the shore.

If he was more merfolk than he is, he wouldn't have said it. As it is, he hopes that Nico stays with him anyway, even as he prays that Nico would run far, far away from the merman who's twisting a red cap in his hands.

"I miss the sea." Nico reaches one hand out—one hand with slight webbing between the fingers—and runs his hands through Percy's hair from where the rain has washed it into his face, so he can see the clear green eyes. "I like the storm."

That's all that Percy needed to hear.

.

_'It's beautiful, regardless,' he said, devotion dripping from his words like ink. 'You're beautiful', was whispered back, and the beauty of never being able to tell a lie is that he knew it was the truth when he heard it._

.

As with all deep discussions these two would ever have, their talk takes place in the miserable, pouring rain.

Nico presses a soft hand to his chest, and guides Percy's long fingers to the identical mark on the fur, flattened and matted by the rain.

'I won't lie to you,' he starts to say, but Percy cuts him short.

'I know you won't, you can't.' He knows what Nico of Angels is now, and he needs to run very, very far.

He'd run back later with a bottle.

.

I tell you this story so you may know three sure things of this coast, this stretch of ocean and its people.

Firstly, you stay off the rocks when a storm rolls around. For every happy ending there are a dozen sad ones, stories of thoughtless loves that bitter into an ending of death. Merfolk do not good loves make.

Secondly, the lighthouse will not work on days when the wind shrieks and you can't see the sky. If you are smart and want to live, you'll be off the water anyway. That lighthouse keeper will always—_always_—be busy if it's storming. He'll be out on the rocks, red cap on his head, sitting with the green-eyed child of the sea in a furry cloak.

Thirdly, there will be times when the sea itself will seem like a calm baby, soft and loving. It is lying to you. The sea is a viscous beast, and I felt the need to warn you of this:

Do not trust it, and do not trust it's folk.

.

There's a last thing you need to remember about merfolk: they cannot break a deal made in good faith.

So when Percy says 'yours for mine', and holds out a soft, worn, scarlet cap, he means it with every last bit of his soul.

And Nico, who cannot lie, says 'forever', he knows that this is his death warrant and his promise ring, his rebirth and undoing.

Two, the most unusual two the ocean could offer up, loved one another more than they loved safety, and second only to the sea.

It was close to fifty years before the sun set over that rock for the last time they saw each other.

That's half a century of danger, of betting on their own lives that they trusted the other that much.

It was a good gamble. It worked out for them.

Percy held Nico's pelt—broken beyond repair or return by another's blade—and held him through the hail on that night when it became just too much.

When the lightning splits the sky, Nico wears Percy's cap with devotion, let his dark hair curl around its edges like his limbs curled around the other when the thunder cracked.

They pray through the sunny days, pray for bad weather, pray for a chance to hold the other.

.

_'I love you', he whispered against skin. _

_'I love you, too.' he heard back. _

_._

It's the worst storm of a long time when Nico unties the knot.

Foolish, wild, dangerous, foolish.

The water is deceptively gentle as it rushes through his mouth, into his lungs, as the arms he loved hold him tight and tugs him down.

.

.

**.**

**A/N: Mermaid!AU. I was looking back through some of my sketches and saw of Mermaid!Percy sketch, and, you know. **

**Tobi. **


End file.
